The Black Minutes (9 page)

A hurricane hit that year and killed hundreds of livestock. Many of the businesspeople in the area lost everything they had. There was a minor fire next to the refinery, which was at first kept secret.

A livestock farmer was kidnapped, and two secret-service policemen liberated him three days later. It was the first time the paper mentioned officers Chávez and Taboada, Cabrera’s long-time coworkers. Remember, he said to himself, that journalist in suspenders, Johnny Guerrero, wrote that the agents following the case were in cahoots with the kidnappers.

Then a new governor came to office, José “Pepe” Topete, a fan of spiritualism, pyramids, and herbal medicine. He only trusted a few of his staff members: the deplorable Juan José Churruca, his government minister; and Licenciado Norris Torres, member of a dynasty of dinosaurs in the office. The beginning of his term coincided with that of two mayors: Daniel Torres Sabinas in Paracuán and Don Agustín Barbosa, the first opposition mayor
of Ciudad Madero. A little while later, the governor would put one of them in prison. That year, 1978, Don Daniel Torres wanted to put on an unforgettable summer carnival, the port’s main celebration commemorating the second founding of the city of Paracuán.

Kojak
was on television.

In the movie theaters, 007’s
Live and Let Die, Papillon, The Exorcist, El santo oficio
by Arturo Ripstein, and
El llanto de la tortuga
with Hugo Stiglitz.

There was a porn movie theater, the Hilda, that had
Emmanuelle, Bilitis
, and
The Story of O
, but most of the time they were showing the same movies over and over again:
Elsa the Pervert; Ubalda, All Naked and Warm; The Gestapo’s Secret Train, College Girls Have Fun, My Lover Is a Puppy
(parts I and II), and other movies that mixed sex and geography:
Asia the Insatiable, Khartoum, Sensual Nights; Samsala, Voracious Tongue
. Understandably, the bishop attacked these movies during his Sunday sermons.

These are the ads: Rigo Tovar Premieres his New LP; Listen to
La Hora de Roberto Carlos
on XEW; José José and His Friends, Juan Gabriel and Guest Stars; Come to the Cherokee Music Disco Nights and dance to the sounds of the Jackson Five, Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, and the Bee Gees. Meet the pretty people and dance to the YMCA.

Social News, January 8: “The distinguished beachgoers in the photo have arrived from Germany. The tanned young ladies have traveled all the way from the Rhine to visit our greatest tourist attraction, Miramón Beach. They are, from left to right: Inge Gustaffson, Deborah Straus, and Patricia Olhoff.”

Local news:
GREAT RISK OF MALARIA INFECTION: VIRUS MIGHT COME IN A TOMATO TRUCK
.

Sports:
CASSIUS CLAY SHOWS OFF AT A PRESS CONFERENCE
.

International:
KISSINGER THREATENS ECONOMIC EMBARGO. ALARM IN THE MIDDLE EAST
.

Local news: “For four consecutive days, Paracuán PRI supporters distribute pamphlets condemning the stones thrown at President Echeverría at the National University.”

Social news, airport: “John and Jack Williams travel to our sister city, San Antonio. Family and friends see them off.”

Local news, blood and gore:
QUINCEÑERA ENDS IN BESTIAL BRAWL; DISGRACEFUL MAN BEATS HIS OWN MOTHER; HUSBAND ABUSES WIFE FOR NO REASON; EPILEPTIC MAN RUN OVER BY BUS; SHADY CHARACTER WITH STUNTED MIND SPENDS FREEZING NIGHT IN THE SLAMMER
.

That was the situation in the progressive city of Paracuán, state of Tamaulipas, always interested in the more spiritual aspects of life (while at the same time condemning the more carnal side). But then the port’s two papers begin to take different tacks: in the following days, their coverage was almost identical, except for the tone of the articles and the style of the headlines.

The first news related to the killer appeared on Thursday, January 12, as a small paid insert, along with the day’s television programming:
DIFFICULT SEARCH: A GIRL IS MISSING
. A photo was included, taken from a yearbook, and next to it appeared the following text:

The young girl in the picture, Lucía Hernández Campillo, disappeared last Monday while on her way to Colegio Froebel. She was wearing a blue skirt and a white shirt with black shoes. Her distressed parents, Everardo and Fernanda, will provide a reward to anyone with information on her whereabouts.

Twenty years later, the headlines from the following day actually seemed more like omens:
LA SIERRA DE OCAMPO BURNS; DROUGHT CAUSES ANXIETY IN PORT; DAMAGE EXPANDS TO CENTER AND NORTH OF TAMAULIPAS
.

TWO SECRET AGENTS ACCUSED OF ROBBERY
. Once again, agents Chávez and Taboada. Cabrera shook his head.
El Desconocido
premiered with Valentín Trujillo.

At two o’clock in the afternoon of February 17, there was a horrendous discovery at El Palmar. A couple rowing around the lagoon found the body of a little girl, Karla Cevallos. The body was badly hidden under branches and dead leaves on a little island, just a few yards away from the busiest avenue in the city.

Ah, Cabrera concluded, so this is what it was. How could I forget? We were working forty-eight-hour shifts to find the killer; I’d just joined the police force. Unfortunately, all the work led nowhere, and the newspapers published a number of editorials about the first girl’s disappearance:
LUCÍA STILL NOT FOUND: PARENTS DISMAYED
.

On March 17, thirty days after Karla Cevallos was found,
El Mercurio
noted,
GRUESOME DISCOVERY DOWNTOWN
. On his way into the bathroom at the Bar León, right in front of La Plaza de Armas, office worker Raúl Silva found the remains of a second girl. But it wasn’t Lucía, it was Julia Concepción González, who had disappeared just a few hours earlier. The resemblance between the two deaths was obvious, and the police had to accept the existence of just one killer.
POLICE LOOK FOR INDIVIDUAL ACCUSED OF SERIOUS CRIMES
.

JACKAL STILL ON THE PROWL
: Agents of the Secret Service focus all their resources on the difficult search for the person
who carried out kidnappings and attacks on several young girls in the last few days.

Newspapers speculated that the offender was passing through the city. It was said he was mentally ill. Both papers interviewed Dr. Margarita López Gasca, a psychiatrist from the health center in the nearby city of Tampico, and at their request she worked up a profile of the killer:

We are dealing with a person unable to function socially, who lacks a moral conscience and who repeats the same acts compulsively, because his greatest satisfaction is to be found in the punishment awaiting him.

She is credited with another comment, obviously inserted by the journalist at
El Mercurio:
“All evidence suggests he will attack again.”

Collective hysteria unleashes in the harbor. Teachers warn their students about the danger, and surveillance is doubled.

That same week in March, when the police announced they had a firm lead in the case, another singular fact occurred, but due to the horror of the crime it went by almost unnoticed: the French archaeologist René Leroux announced he had finally discovered the exact location of the legendary and mysterious pyramid of a thousand flowers and a conch shell. Anyone who has lived in the harbor knows that the legendary pyramid of a thousand flowers and a conch shell was located in the garden behind Mrs. Harris’s house. The mound was about thirteen feet tall and covered by a thick layer of grass. According to the French archaeologist, those thirteen feet were just the tip of the iceberg. According to the legends in the area, the pyramid was four thousand years old and
over three hundred feet high and might be home to important treasures. To support his claim, he said all you had to do was ask the residents of the neighborhood how hard it was to build their houses’ foundations and have them show you the clay objects found during the construction work. The mound’s neighbors, including Mrs. Harris, didn’t want to hear a thing about it, so the pyramid stayed buried for more than twenty years.

Just a few days apart, both papers published incendiary editorials, demanding that the killer be arrested and suggesting that if the offender were still free it was because he was a person with power. As popular resentment increased, the weather report augured that the situation would remain the same for the next few hours: “Threat of rain. Gale-force winds blow in from the northeast.”

At the beginning of March, an anonymous donor had offered twenty-five thousand and then later fifty thousand dollars to anyone who helped find the jackal. Attracted by the reward, amateurs, ex-cops, and detectives had invaded the city. The race for the reward began.

Popular anger had not subdued when, on March 20, a group of Boy Scouts, entering an abandoned construction site, found the bodies of Lucía Hernández Campillo and Inés Gómez Lobato.
El Mercurio
spared no details or unpleasant pictures, and general rage was unleashed:
TWO MORE GIRLS FOUND; TODAY AT 5, PROTEST IN THE PORT
.

From Mexico City, the head of the National Professors’ Union announced that, if no one intervened in the matter, they would call a national strike. The union, with four hundred thousand professors, was one of the most powerful in the country. The governor intervened in the case, and finally, on March 21, the killer was arrested; he gave an immediate confession. Cabrera could only follow the story up to this point, because the files in
the archives were incomplete. Judging by what he read, it was obvious that the trial was full of irregularities. The defense attorney insisted important evidence had been covered up, evidence that would have led the investigation in a different direction.

A few days after the trial began,
La Noticia
stopped covering it, and
El Mercurio
did the same a day later. That weekend
La Noticia
published a photograph that had impressed Cabrera a great deal back then. It was the image of a bearded man, dressed in white like an ancient Christian, with a gigantic piece of fabric over an immense expanse of water: “Bulgarian artist Christo Javacheff covers King’s Beach, Massachussetts, with over 40,000 square feet of white fabric.”

From that moment on, the papers didn’t mention the subject again and the crime section went back to normal:
JAWS
OPENS; CONSTRUCTION WORKER’S DRAMATIC SUICIDE; THIEF NEVER GIVES UP; SKILLED SMUGGLER
. On June 20, the minister of health, on a visit to the port city, confirmed that the region was no longer at risk of malaria. But looking through the crime section for the following months, it was clear that even though the killer was tried and locked up, the bodies of little girls kept turning up in the northern part of the state. Cabrera tried to get more information, but the files in the archives stopped there.

When Cabrera asked for the volume with the newspapers from May and June, the attendant came back empty-handed.

“That’s strange! They’re not where they should be or anywhere in the stacks. It must be misplaced. I’m very sorry, but I have to go now. You should report it to the director, Don Rodrigo Montoya.”

The director turned out to be one of the people from the funeral; he had been talking to Bernardo’s father. Cabrera’s request seemed to surprise him.

“Excuse me?”

“I need to see the fourth volume from 1970, the book that has May and June.”

“It wasn’t there?”

“No. I read though March but they couldn’t find the next one.”

“It’s very odd that it’s not where it should be. I’m obsessive about organization. It’s probably the social service people, they mess everything up.”

He called the attendant in charge on an intercom and ordered her to look for it again. From his window, the lagoon was visible, surrounded by cranes and bulldozers.

“They’re checking on it right now.”

He was about to say something else when the attendant called back. “I already looked, Licenciado, and it’s not there.”

“Keep looking, Claudina.” He looked out the window again at the bulldozers, and after thinking for a minute he turned to Cabrera. “Not many people come to the archives. Now that I think about it, only one other person ever asked me for that volume, and we buried him this morning.”

Cabrera explained that he was in charge of the case, and the director looked at the bulldozers.

“Look,” he said, “three months ago, Bernardo came for the first time. He said he was researching the economic history of the city. I warned him he wasn’t going to find much, because things here have never changed, but he came anyway to read in the archives every day for three weeks, and it took me a while to understand what he was looking for. He was very discreet. One afternoon I found him making copies of some pages that definitely had historical value but had nothing to do with the local economy, or at least not in an obvious way, so I stood next to him and said, ‘There are a lot of people who would be very angry if they found out you were poking around in that case; it’s a very delicate issue.’ And he asked me, ‘What would Dr. Quiroz Cuarón have said?’ That comment made me realize that Bernardo knew about my humble participation in the case when I worked for the police force more than twenty years ago, so I answered, ‘If you want to know what the doctor said, I have his testimony, and you can see it if you like . . . but if you want to get even more information on the case, there’s someone else who could tell you more interesting things, things that have been forgotten.’ I warned him it could be dangerous, because that person lives at the margins of the law. He was a cop back then, and he knew how everything went down. Bernardo made a note and told me, ‘I’ll think about it.’ He disappeared for several weeks, and then ten days ago he came looking for me to ask me the informant’s whereabouts. I got him an
appointment and found out they met together. I thought that since this person had some unresolved problems with the law, they would pin Bernardo’s death on him, but as you know, that’s not how it happened: they blamed El Chincualillo. But I’m absolutely certain that the informant is innocent: I can vouch for him.”